Critical Literacy and Transformative Social Practice: An Ethical Grounding

Abstract

Colin Hearfield and Bob Boughton contend that, over roughly the past seventy‐five years, a number of writers have attempted to underwrite the relationship between critical literacy and transformative social practice with an ethics of freedom and social justice. The first two such writers they address, Frantz Fanon and Paulo Freire, draw on a humanist ethics of social freedom, whereas the latter two, Amartya Sen and Jack Mezirow, turn respectively to Immanuel Kant's moral theory of individual freedom and Jürgen Habermas's ethics of communicative interaction. Hearfield and Boughton begin by discussing various shortcomings of the approach each of these writers takes, and then argue that a more adequate grounding can be found in Axel Honneth's ethics of recognition, where the idea of social freedom again comes to prominence. Unlike the others, Honneth, a contemporary German philosopher and former research assistant of Habermas, does not address explicitly the issue of critical literacy, but he does speak of the right to education as an already significant aspect of the modern ethics of recognition. The driving motivation for Hearfield and Boughton's discussion in this article is the situation of many Indigenous Australians who remain unable to read or write Standard Australian English (SAE) and thus cannot participate, or have an effective voice, in deliberations concerning their own and their people's situation in the political landscape of modern Australia.